I came early to enjoy the beautiful city
since it’s such a long flight, and ML and Kyle are in Hawaii anyway.I left my apartment at noon, arrived in Singapore at
7pm, and enjoyed a great soba salmon salad and beer at the micro-brewery in the
great Changi airport.I casually walked
up to my gate, only to find my flight wasn’t there anymore!After much confusion, I realized I read my
connecting flight time wrong – it turns out 20:00 is not 10pm!!Arghh, I missed my flight!Thank god Singapore airlines is awesome and
they got me on the next flight out at 12:30am.I had to practice the Power of Now to not totally stress out.

And the Power of Now was right.The stress was totally in my head.Whether I stressed or not wouldn’t make me
get on the flight I missed, nor would it help my chances to get on a future
flight.Staying calm, using my mind as a
tool (e.g., go to Singapore Airlines desk and ask politely for help), and
accepting the consequences (in this case it was good – “Please wait 2 more
hours in the lounge Mr. Tien”) was the best way to handle the situation.

I arrived in Sydney by 10am and got to the Shangri-La by
noon.My room has a view of the HarborBridge
(pic 1)!The helpful concierge Shane
directed me to The Rocks for lunch.I
enjoyed a great gyro at Dare (to eat responsibly, is their motto) café on a
cool but sunny day.

Then I walked through the flea market and
watched in amazement as Darren Germain spray-painted incredible “space
art.”I asked him to make a custom one
for me – pic 4 shows him with a blank canvas above a similar spray-painting,
and pic 5 is the finished product.See
this YouTube video to get a sense of how he did it.It was awesome!

After the high of buying a cool sci-fi art
piece (since I love science fiction so much), I walked to Sydney Cove.I love my pic of the bird with the haloed
sign “This is Freedom” in back (the Biennale art festival is at the Museum of Contemporary Art).Very adventurously, I took an extremely
enjoyable ferry-ride to DarlingHarbor.There, I walked around the mall HarboursideShopping Center for a long time,
eventually getting a “short black” (espresso shot) and a macadamia brownie.Yum.

Cravings covered, I took the monorail
through its entire loop – about half an hour.It shoud’ve been a nice view of the city centre but it was raining.Nevertheless, it was enjoyable (my practicing
the Power of Now?).

I then walked over to StarCity, the casino right in Sydney!I watched all the games but didn’t play
anything.Hungry, I walked back to
Harbourside but didn’t find anything to my liking.I walked around to the other side of DarlingHarbor
to CockleBayWharf
– my back started hurting by then.During the walk, I saw that The Dark Knight was playing on IMAX!It was sold out for the night, so I bought
tickets for tomorrow.It’s going to be
awesome!I finally settled on Blackbird
Café for some fish & chips, but it was disappointing.If I’m going to eat deep fried food, it
should be really really good!

Rather stupidly, I walked all the way back
to Shangri-La, stopping in Max Brenner’s chocolate bar for some soy hot
chocolate to give my aching back a rest.